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My students find living artists fascinating, especially if those artists live in Georgia our home state. During my undergraduate experience at the University of Georgia, I discovered a local artist named Beverly Buchanan. She creates beautiful pastel drawings of shacks. Her shacks are not sad houses, but rich, vibrant dwellings filled with memories of people who once lived there.
Buchanan also creates sculptures of shacks made from found pieces of wood and shingles. I wanted my students to use different materials to capture the essence of Buchanan's drawing and sculptures, which led to a fun art project for my second- and third-graders. Using a variety of textures, my students turned simple shacks into creative collages!
On the first day, we looked at the shack drawings and sculptures using a PowerPoint presentation of images found at www.beverlybuchanan.com. This neat Web site has links to galleries, as well as background information on the artist. I am fortunate to have a projector attached to my laptop, which allows my students to "draw" on top of images projected on my white board. They love finding shapes, lines and exploring relationships between colors and spaces in artwork. It is truly an interactive exploration of art.
Once everyone sees Buchanan's shacks, we get to work on our collages....